Antarctic adélie penguins are threatened by bird flu
Steve Bloom Images / Alamy Stock Photo
H5N1 bird flu found in the dead birds in the first time in Antarctica. The deadly strain of the bird flu is being extended to the south of the Antarctic Peninsula and was expanded around the continent, such as destructive consequences penguins.
“It’s scary. Fortunately, it’s just a few (birds) causing it,” he says Juliana Vianna Santiago in the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. “I hope it was like that, but the bird of Chilen and Peruvian the bird was a disaster. He killed thousands and thousands of seafood and sea lions.”
Between November 2024 and January 2025, the Vianna’s team made the nests of seabirds 16 years across the Antarctic Peninsula. Researchers found a 35 dead skuka that had no trace of injury. The 11-year-old body samples were found positive for the world’s highly pathogenic bird flu virus spread around the world in the world.
Skuas caught in front of bodies and other birds, so feeding on infected birds will be polluted to be particularly infected. Skuak in this area are hybrids between the south polar (Stercorarius MacCormicki) and brown (Mortem Antarctica) Shake.
So far there is no case confirmed in other types of birds, but Vianna said they also found dead penguins. “We talked to the Institute of Antarctic Chile,” he explained. “Skuas and penguins saw dead”.
Because penguins breed in dense colonies, fear is rapidly expanded between them and kill a large proportion of some populations, many of them There are already declining due to climate change. H5N1 bird susceptibility varies from species to species, however, some species of penguins can be resistant, Vianna says.
A H5N1 pathogenic form of bird flu In Europe, it has circulated Asian and Africa from 2020, Killing wild birds and caused events in bird farms. In the UK, for example, H5N1 dies Gannets quarter In 2023.
In 2021 he arrived in North America, and then found that the paving was polluting Expanding milk cows and their. 2022. By the end of the year, he spread to the southern end of South America, Killing thousands of marine mammal as well as birds of different species along the way.
Skuas brown brown and petrel giant on the island of birds, outside the island of south georgia, Test positive for virus in 2023. South Georgia is located 1500 kilometers from the Antarctic Peninsula.
In December 2023 and January 2024, Vianna Group They found signs of infection in the living adélie penguins and Shag Antarctica on the mainland lining. The presence of virus around the continent has been confirmed.
“The deaths of Skuas are referred to,” he says Thijs kuiken Rotterdam of Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Some regional species are only found in small islands and could be eliminated by bird flu.
However, the test described in Vianna’s study shows that the SKUs were infected with the H5 flu, Kuikken says, it is not a pathogenic form.
That is correct, says Vianna, but samples were sent to tests that were not specified on paper. “So it is confirmed as a very pathogenic bird flu,” he explains.
On February 25, another research team reported Finding H5N1 in the archipelago of Crozet and Kerguel In the Indian Ocean near Antarctica, the virus has killed elephant stamps, as well as many bird species. This means that the virus has moved halfway around the Antarctica, just to Australia and New Zealand – only the main countries that remain without viruses.
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